left eye on gub'ment

Job Opening: Director of Toys for Spies

Have the chops to lead the spy agency charged with developing an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over our future adversaries”? Here’s your chance: IARPA’s (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) director Lisa Porter is stepping down from the outfit Danger Room likes to call DARPA for Spies, possibly to be in the running to head up DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, most recently semi-famous for its cool-scary mechanical cheetah) itself.

Iarpa’s projects are explicitly not driven not by immediate need, freeing up its scientists and developers to figure out how to read minds and pinpoint where any snapshot was snapped. The blue sky projects are cutely called seedlings, and the agency has a special greenhouse called “smart collection” for seedlings that will “dramatically improve the value of collected data.”